Learning Implants have an interesting place in eve where they take up 1 or more clones on your character and only really provide value when you’re not playing the game in other aspects (you move to an empty clone for fighting, or a combat clone). You could undock in them on accident causing some funny killmails but eh, I think there’s a better way.
The Change:
Make the traditional Learning Implants operate like boosters with a much longer duration than current ones.
Combine all groups +1, +2, +3, +4 and +5 implants into their respective boosters
Replace these implants with the new boosters in the LP store with their cost being changed to reflect it and their expiration time to 6 months, boosters stack time so you can purchase multiple at a time and have the time add up to avoid lapses.
Maybe reduce cost here so a set is more accessible
15-20m for +3s instead of ~40ish
50-60m vs 120m for +4s
250-300m instead of 500ish for +5s
Allow these boosters to be “upgraded”, IE: 3 months of +3 converts to 2months of +4 time when you inject a high tier (NOT REAL MATH SP/HR Is a bit more complex).
They don’t get removed when your pod explodes like boosters.
Remove the attribute bonus from existing ship bonus implants
But why?:
Free up precious jump clone slots
Focuses all implant slots on being additions to your ship and what activities you are doing.
Less upfront investment to get access to learning implants, less confusion for new players that may be making choices on what implants they are looking at buying first
No more accidentally forgetting to swap to your learning pod overnight or before that long trip
No more accidents forgetting to swap pods for fleets
Most importantly, Add additional pressure on the learning implant market for LP by making learning implants consumable
This pushes people into LP producing activities like mission running and faction war.
This will make faction gear more expensive however, so maybe balance out where higher tier learning boosters come from traditional empire mission running LP Stores? As most faction gear comes from faction war atm
I like the idea in general - I’m just not sure about the pricing (considering these only last 6 months). Suggestions for consideration:
• Drastically reduce the pricing (not sure what’s reasonable here)
• Limited these to one month (30 days), so x2 (60 days) with full skills - this way they work the same as other boosters, ie: you have to wait for them to expire before injecting a new one.
Additional thoughts (and questions):
• Do skill boosters make it too confusing with existing cerebral accelerators?
• Can we have skill training boosters and cerebral accelerators running at the same time?
• Is there a better way to implement the +1 to +5 skill training boost?
That would dramatically simplify the implementation of them for sure. Just want to be sure they are sufficiently separate from existing boosters and ensure you can use both at the same time still.
Just an alternate idea to throw out there… we could roll the learning implants into pods, ie:
• +1/2 - Alphas and Omegas
• +3/4/5 - Omegas only
Some of the really rare pods could get a +5 with all the others getting a range from +1-4. Not sure if Alphas are currently limited with respect to implants.
Because if they were good ideas CCP would already have implemented them.
What do you think, that those game designers just sit their butts on chairs and drink beers or what??
Or do you think they’re so fcking stupid that they wait after you clowns to come up with good ideas?
Leave devs jobs to the devs and go to your own job, wherever that may be, streets weeping or trash collecting. Whatever.
EVE devs have previously stated (few years ago, at fanfest) that they want to do away with both attributes and the skill queue. Since training implants buff attributes, I imagine that would mean they’d be changed in some way. How would players who already invested in those implants be compensated? Anyone’s guess. That may even be a sticking point with making such a change, I don’t know. Although any player of a certain age will recall the removal of learning skills and how that was handled, and have some ideas.
Anyway, my point is, if CCP ever follows through on the above changes and moves from a queue model to a straight SP-accrual-over-time model, I expect the cerebral accelerator boosters will be modified to simply increase the rate of accrual to various degrees (similar to what the OP proposes) and all the attribute implants will go away regardless.
In the meantime, I wouldn’t expect any changes from CCP that might further entrench attributes as a game mechanic.